How does climate change happen, and how does it affect humans? It seems like such a simple question, but, as my students learned this fall, there is much more than meets the eye.
On the first day of my youth class at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple, titled “Jewish Climate Solutions,” I asked my 8th and 9th grade students to draw pictures of their answers to this initial question on large poster boards. The results were wildly different. Some drew pictures of cows and some of humans; some drew industrial exhaust; others, individual cars. Some even drew Taylor Swift’s private jet, showing the consequences of celebrities and other public figures’ emissions.
This practice of “mental modeling” is commonly used within science communication, especially for things that are fear-inducing or highly technical. We all know that teaching a child and an adult the same information will require different starting points; the same principles also apply to people at the same intellectual levels, but who have different baseline information. The practice entails digging deep into how people already think about something to find a starting point for communication. By seeing these students’ starting point, I could design a route for the rest of the class.
After everyone had drawn their mental model, I conducted a focus group, asking them to share what they thought were the most important parts of their models and looking for commonalities between them. More than factual accuracy, I wanted to know about the connections they were making between climate change as an abstract phenomenon and the concrete changes they are seeing in their lives. We looked for any commonalities between everyone’s models with an eye toward using the differences to build a whole-class model. Most importantly, we looked for connections.
As the class progressed each week we began to expand our models. Unsurprisingly, we talked about how greenhouse gasses trap solar radiation, but we also talked about the individual and collective actions that hasten and delay climate change. Then we switched course, talking about how climate change is worsening disasters and health and impacting refugees. But why?
As I told them, climate change is a chain of events. There is no omnipotent individual, first-named “Climate” and last-named “Change,” who is going around putting water in people’s basements and moving people from one place to another. Climate change, rather, is raising sea levels and worsening flooding, which then floods basements, and this in turn is making conditions worse for people in one place, pushing them from their homes to new locales.
We then learned about climate change’s causes and effects, making note of all the ways humanity is intertwined with both sides of this equation. By creating a model of the problem, we can begin to see parts we might have missed before. By learning how climate change creates and affects refugees, we can include our Temple’s work with refugees as a climate change solution. Suddenly, the tradition of caring for the stranger becomes climate work.
I then took mental modeling one step further, looking at how we as individuals and as a temple community can make a positive impact on climate. After all, this class is more than a “climate class.” Instead, my students learned about how to bring change to the world, starting with themselves and our temple. Framed around the idea of gimilut chassadim, acts of loving kindness, the class used climate as a model for how we can sketch out how problems occur and then fix them. In addition to drawing connections to the refugee crisis, as we learn how climate change worsens disasters and health, we can include housing justice and health accessibility as a climate change solution. Our Temple’s Diaper Bank and our annual hosting of the county’s men’s shelter become climate solutions.
At the end of the course, we then practiced our mental modeling technique on other problems we were interested in solving. Whether they were hunger and homelessness, civil and voting rights, or gun violence prevention, mental-modeling problems helped us find solutions. Even more, it shows us the linkages between each of them. By seeing each issue less like an individual “box” and more as connected to others, we can make our efforts more meaningful to ourselves and our fulfillment of Jewish values.
While taking only one action at a time may feel small, we can remember that “we are not obligated to finish the work, but neither are we free to desist from it.” Mental modeling shows us that these small steps can have big impacts, chipping away at multiple problems altogether.
(This post is part of Sinai and Synapses’ project Scientists in Synagogues, a grass-roots program to offer Jews opportunities to explore the most interesting and pressing questions surrounding Judaism and science. Frederic Traylor is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Rutgers University and led science programs for kids at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick, NJ as part of the grant.)
Photo/painting: UNDP in Europe
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